:: Rob Dyke

This piece of "research" needs a context. By the time you read this in "Well" I'll be well on my way up Everest as cook and mountain roadie to the British team. If all goes well I should get pretty close to the summit and will let you know how a pedometer performs at that altitude.

ice crevasse

When I come down from the mountain I will turn my attention to swimming and my attempt to become the first person to swim the 1500 cold kilometers around Vancouver Island.

As part of my preparation for Everest I have been doing daily trips up 2 of the modest 'mountains' near Victoria, Mount Finlayson and Mount Work. When climbing the latter, I just tell people I'm going to Work, which makes me seem quite normal.

My sister's dog, Emma Jane, keeps me company on my daily ascents and on my runs around Thetis Lake. Recently, she has been wearing a pedometer. Emma Jane is not on a leash so the distance she travels is not standardized. However, it's been interesting to experiment putting a petometer on a dog and also to note the impact of vigorous exercise on a dog who's relatively inactive when I'm away.

Literature Search

In any research project the first step is to survey the academic literature. Sure enough there was plenty of information about how dogs move, much of it almost unreadable to the casual observer. A typical example is the work of J W Blaszczyk, who wrote on the subject of "Gait transitions during long distance, unrestrained locomotion". This was carefully conducted and contained observations such as, "In contrast to the clear border between symmetrical gaits, the dogs switched to gallop at any speed within the trot (most frequently between 1.5 and 2.6 m/s)."

What this all amounted to was that typically the movements of each side of the dog mirror each other while it walks or trots, but become asymmetrical when it breaks into a gallop.

Attaching the Petometer

The easiest method for a dog to wear a pedometer is on its collar and after some experimentation this became the standard procedure with Emma Jane, who objected to having one attached to her tail. Robert Sweetgall, in his book "Pedometer Walking", reports that he put a rubber band around the front leg of his dog (a Shepherd/Lab/Cocker mix) and clipped a pedometer to that. He notes that the dog did 218 steps to his own 124, which is a very neat ratio of almost 2 to 1. However, 124 steps is about one football field and I'd have liked to know about other extended trials and how adept his dog became at removing the annoying impediment from its leg.

I found that on a steady walk the side to side bobbing of Emma's tail nicely reflected the pattern of her walk but she disliked having the pedometer attached to her tail and this 'experiment' was not designed to make my dog miserable, (Obviously there are also problems in keeping the pedometer anything like vertical if it is attached to a dog's tail.) so the collar became a good compromise for man and beast.

Results

There was a higher dog to human step ratio on the Thetis trail because of the numerous diversions of other dogs, humans and things to chase. The reason that there are 3 human trials and only 2 dog trials was an unauthorized swim by Emma Jane! The Omron pedometer was soaked and I could see water in the display. To my amazement, after 4 days of drying out the petometer came back to life and still functions perfectly.

When attached to the dog's collar, a pedometer records approximately 1 1/4 'steps' for each human step. I'm sure this will vary with the size of the dog, whether or not the dog is on a leash, the type of terrain and many other variables. I hope this will be a stimulus for you to try some experiments with your own dog.

Living with my sister, Emma Jane is spoiled, only moderately active and, in the words of my sister, "chunky". In one month of trotting up mountains and round lakes her weight went from 88 lbs down to 83 lbs, which is about 5% of her body weight. I know that Martin often says that getting a dog will help humans lose weight because they need to be walked each day. In my case it was a human helping a dog lose weight.

Observations and Anecdotes

The pedometer seemed most accurate when the dog ran (galloped) and was reduced when the dog walked. This is similar to humans where pedometers often record less well with slow or intermittent movement.

If your dog has long hair, look all the way round their collar before assuming the pedometer fell off. I once re-walked an entire trail only to discover the pedometer still on Emma Jane's collar, hidden in a role of fur.

If you leave your dog at home during the day you can gage their activity. Emma left on her own is very, for lack of better words, lazy. Over the course of a day in the house only 200 steps were taken. Coincidently, this is about 3 trips to her food bowl. If you employ one of those dog-walking services this would be a great way to seem how much exercise your dog is truly getting.

Once I began my 'research' I quickly re-christened my pedometer a 'petometer' and could see great potential for marketing 'petometers' to the millions of dog owners in North America. But somebody was ahead of me and when Bev Mason and Ron Nye were setting up the article they both found internet sites advertising 'petometers'. If you'd like not go to this site

Ultimately, the pedometer experiments are just another way to have fun with your dog.

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